Transferring RAID

I've got an ASUS P5B Premium Vista Edition motherboard with an onboard RAID controller (ICH8). I'm pretty sure the motherboard is bad as 2 sets of RAM have died on it in the past year, so I'm looking to replace the motherboard.

I'm using the motherboard's RAID controller (yes, I know, I should use a separate RAID card) to run a RAID5 array, however, and I don't want to lose that array. I'm wondering if it's possible to use this array with either a new mobo with ICH9, or with a separate RAID card.

Thanks.

i dont think you will have a problem going form the ich8r to the ich9r... i took a raid array from a ich5r and had it work no prob on my ich7r ... i think you would get introuble if you went backwards IE 9r to 8r only if you were using some feature on the 9r that the 8r didnt have.

and the onboard ICH raid controlers do a very good job, dont know why people get the impression that they are bad...

I have a RAID5 array. So far on the internet I've read about people doing this sort of transfer with RAID0 and RAID1, but haven't read anything about RAID5.

Will I have to make any changes in the BIOS, etc, before trying to boot? Or should I just be able to plug in the drives and go?

What you described is called a RAID10 (0+1) striping with redundancy.

Basically though, you lose half your storage. I have four 250GB HDDs. Two in a raid 0 and two in a raid 1 (The raid 0+1). So, as you can see, two are dedicated to just backing up the first two.